So much for that potential Cleveland-Pittsburgh World Series.
Armageddon, anyone?
In the meantime, let the post-mortems begin on the Indians’ grand and glorious — albeit too abruptly over — 2013 season. They won a lot of games, won back a lot of fans, and won the right to dream big next year.
Don’t look now, but we’re only a little more than four months away from the start of spring training, bro.
As we, they and us gaze 2014-ward, the thing that jumps out most about what the Indians need to do to become even bigger hardball heroes next year is this: They have to start beating good teams, not just the bad ones.
That’s the next step for the Indians, and it’s a really big step. In fact, in some ways, none of us should have been surprised that the Indians were the first ones out of the American League side of this year’s postseason tournament.
There is a statistic that none of us paid enough attention to this season: The Indians’ record vs. teams with winning records. Cynics would maintain it screams of the Indians: “They aren’t as good as you think they are.” Feel free to dispute that, but what is the only AL team eliminated from the playoffs so far?
First, let’s examine the records of the other four AL playoff teams vs. teams with winning records:
-- The Red Sox had a winning percentage of .548 (51-42).
-- The Tigers were at .545 (48-40).
-- The A’s against winning teams had a .541 winning percentage (40-34).
-- The Rays were at .505 (47-46).
The Indians? Get out your binoculars. Against teams with winning records, the Indians were 36-52. That’s a winning percentage of .409. That’s a problem. That’s a big problem. Because in the playoffs, you don’t face bad teams. You face the best teams.
It wouldn’t be a problem if the Indians were closer to the other four AL playoff teams in this category. But they are not. The Indians aren’t even in the same time zone with the other teams. Three of the four have winning percentages vs. winning teams that are 100 points higher than the Indians, and the Rays are close to 100 points higher than the Tribe.
Good teams beat good teams. The Indians in 2013 lost to good teams. Lost a lot. Lost way more than any team that thinks it’s good should.
You of course already know that the Indians were a Chernobyl-like 4-15 vs. the Tigers this year. What you might not know is that the Indians’ record in the regular season vs. the other four AL playoff teams — Detroit, Boston, Oakland and Tampa Bay — was 12-27 (.308).
The Indians were also 0-3 vs. Atlanta and 2-2 vs. Cincinnati, who made it to the National League playoffs. So the Indians’ record vs. the six teams that they played this year who qualified for the postseason was 14-32. That’s a microscopic winning percentage of .304.
Obviously, you’re not going to play .600 baseball against playoff teams. But .304 isn’t going to cut it. You could even argue that .304 is the kind of winning percentage against the best teams that stamps the team that has that winning percentage as not being one of the best teams.
Therein lies the challenge for the Indians in 2014. They made the playoffs this season, but they made it mostly because they very rarely lost to the lousy teams.
If you can do that for an entire season, you might be able to make it to the postseason. But once you get there, you stand a good chance of getting exposed for what you are — and getting exposed quite quickly. That’s exactly what happened to the Indians.
They not only lost, but they lost quickly, and decisively — failing to score a single run — in a 4-0 loss to a very good Tampa Bay team.
Check out the last names of the losing pitchers during the Indians’ 10-game season-ending winning streak: Cruz, Oberholtzer, Clemens, Bedard, Reed, Axelrod, Albers, Hernandez, DeVries and Diamond.
That’s not to discredit the Tribe’s winning streak. Winning 10 in a row is great achievement in any sport, regardless of the opponent.
The point here is Alex Cobb, who toyed with Tribe hitters Wednesday night, when he didn’t even have his best stuff — “my fastball location was all over the place and my changeup was non-existent,” he said — is easily better than any pitcher the Indians faced in their winning streak.
They’re not in Kansas anymore.
The Indians have proved they can beat the bad teams. The next step now is to start beating some of the good ones.